Alexandra Cherian
Wounds of Art
after Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)
I. swept leaves
Dried rings of flowers drape the stranger tree in autumn. I’m slowly learning your pine-scent tongue, how you whisper familiarity and touch warm. In our lives we to and fro like detritus beetles beneath a rotted log, and one day I think it will be lifted. There are things I’m not sure I want, but when you speak I feel myself uneclipsing.
II. stage blood
It starts when you cup my chin, meet my gaze to yours. Would you tuck my hair to the side and trace your eyes across my throat, down my sternum to hold me at the true ribs? Would you dig your fingers in at the notch until my skin pulls and threatens? I look at you and wonder this.
III. childhood friend
Take me up the hill and show me where the river bends past my bloody heels. I want to wrestle, to reach my worthy arms under yours and feel clutching at my thigh. You startle me—your songbird feathers—your fingers curling in my bramble hair. Give me trial, I don’t want to win easily.
IV. early mist
I’m waiting to write this chapter in the morning after.
Under the bicycle
When I’m here I feel so cosmopolitan,
like a Cindy Sherman photograph—
the kind with low lighting and a wig,
those moody eyes and maybe a cigarette.
My friends sip cherry liquor like ravenous bees,
our hive eyes following the owner’s kid
playing cowboy between the table legs,
and he never misses his shot.
It’s one of those places, you know,
where even the air sits expectantly
and something embryonic in the glass
is rising to my lips.
Dead Generations
poetry from the future cannot begin before it has stripped away
the past.
all great world-historic personages appear twice.
the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy .
and they seem to be revolutionising something that did not exist before,
the spirits borrowing borrowed language.
thus the Apostle Napoleon
draped in his mother tongue,
moves the dead of world history.
freely
conjuring up
sober hog-headed ghosts of the Roman
cradle.
unheroic society is terror,
gladiators needed to conceal themselves
recoiling from reality;
like the mad living in the time of the old Pharaohs.
the memory of barbarian war slaves with a long whip
who understand
no common language
remove any doubt which had long since
seemed long dead .
Alexandra Cherian (she/they) is a filmmaker, writer, and girltwink extraordinaire from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She has been published in bad apple, Overcom, and Starling among others, and is a founding member of queer filmmaking collective The New New.
Alexandra writes: “The text of ‘Dead Generations’ is found and arranged from ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ by Karl Marx.’